“In these charts and relief maps, horizontal distance represents time; vertical distance, space, or sections of country. Red, yellow, blue and black lines permit recording four social or other conditions at once, while elevation and degree of roughness of surface add two more to the number simultaneously expressible.
“As a simple instance, this chart is devoted to the Sacredness of the Marriage Relation, from the year one of the Christian era to the present day. The portions to the left indicate early periods, those in the centre, present time; those at the right, time to come; each decade being represented by one-half inch of length of the chart. The various strips are devoted to different geographical divisions; that given to our own country being sub-divided into strips corresponding to its various States and Territories. The depth of red tint shows the degree of respect or disrespect for woman; blue tints correspond to enactments rendering marriage more sacred, divorce more difficult, the rights of women more general and acknowledged. Thus we see in this blood-red quarter to the left, an indication of promiscuity in the sexual relation. The lighter red stands for polyandry, or that state in which the woman has several husbands, living peacefully together. This is due to a scarcity of women, owing to the female infants being exposed at birth or sold as slaves.
“Note that in Great Britain, in the time of Julius Caesar, this form prevailed; and that it continues up to the present day in the Neilgherry Hills, India, and with the Herero tribe of South Africa. It appears in greatest perfection in some tribes of Thibet, where all the brothers of a family have but one wife in common.
“Here among the Eskimos, Aleutians, and Kolushes of the north and northwest coasts of America, we have still a marked red stripe, due to the fact that among these tribes a married woman is the wife of all the married men of the tribe, and each married man is the husband of all the married women—which does not, however, prevent the distinctions between the married and unmarried being rigidly observed.
“This state is followed by polygamy, indicated by a lighter shade of red, and which accounts for this local patch in the Utah strip, nearly down to 1890.
“Monogamy is rare among the ruder races, but this strip of paler red in Ceylon is to represent the Veddahs, where each male takes but one wife, and is true to her alone until separated by death.
“Almost simultaneously with the fading in the red tint, which fading represents increasing respect for women, we have a deepening of the blue tint lines which stand for ecclesiastical and legal protection of the marriage relation and of the rights of woman. Thus we see the chart changing from deep red to reddish purple, from this through purple to bluish purple; and the future shows deep blue as indicating the absolute recognition, formal and social, of all woman’s claims to honor, protection, and property. See now, from the year 400 A. D. on to the right, a sudden deepening of the blue, indicating the canonical law pronouncing a marriage indissoluble—as is still the law in the Roman Catholic Church.
“Note here local differences of color due to the fact that among the Shawnee Indians the women, while the only drudges, yet own all the property; and that among the Osages of our Western plains the oldest daughter on her marriage comes into possession of all the family property.
“In our own country, see the extra blueness of South Carolina, which has no divorce laws; of Georgia, in which absolute divorce is granted only after the concurrent verdict of two juries, at different terms of the court; and of New York, where it is accorded for but one cause only—adultery. See how the blue is paled in the District of Columbia and in Wisconsin, where the granting of divorce for any cause is practically left to the discretion of the Court. See how feeble the blue in Illinois and in Rhode Island, yet note how it is overwhelmed by the other strips, so that it is safe to predict that by 1925 those States will have been compelled by pressure of public opinion to enact and enforce laws more thoroughly protecting women. This we must read in connection with the chart showing centralization of government and uniformity of legislation in America, and with that one showing the increase of Roman Catholicism in the State of Illinois, and in its neighbor Missouri.
“In the same way I here show graphically the evolution of recorded speech, from thought-writing by pictures—as practised among the American tribes, particularly those of Mexico and Central America, in China and the valley of the Nile—to sound-writing as first done by rebuses, and the cuneiform method of syllabic writing in the Valley of Mesopotamia; then alphabets proper, first non-phonetic as adopted by the Hebrews, Greeks and Romans, and by ourselves; then phonetic, which the rapidly increasing rate of increase of the yellow lines representing the phonetic principle shows will soon become universal.